"Is he crazy?"--a covert answer, and close but no cigar

    Clawing through the high stack of current newspapers, I randomly pull a September 14 Edmonton Sun--and accidentally stumble on a feature by Michael Platt of the Calgary Sun, headlined:

UNBEARABLE TRUTH COST FRANKLIN
PIONEER PROPER RECOGNITION

The editor in me cringes at the awkwardness of the double-stack (especially the split "Franklin pioneer" which is somewhat vague to begin with), but the story it tells (yes, online too) is a fascinating tale of dullards thinking inside the rut, until after a century and a half a sharp mind o'erleaps the mucky track and rolls to proper conclusions. I would headline it:

BRITAIN FINALLY RECOGNIZES RAE,
MALIGNED ARCTIC EXPLORER

John Rae in fact was the seaman who in 1854 discovered some remains of the ill-fated Franklin Expedition to find the Northwest Passage, including evidence of cannibalism among the desperate Franklin crew before they perished; and also the final link of the Northwest Passage, the Rae Channel, which Amundsen used (with full credit to Rae) in his pioneering voyage through the Passage in 1903-4.
    All of which is interesting in itself, as are the literary heroics of Ken McGoogan in telling the whole tangled tale in a number of books (he also spoke at the laying of a ledger-stone to Rae in Westminster Abbey).
   But for me the punchline is the 150-year delay in recognition--a classic case of shoot-the-messenger. Because Rae had concluded and reported cannibalism, he was rendered persona non grata and shunned. No one likes to hear horrific things (unless the horror is safely contained in Hollywood claptrap).
    This verity strikes close to home, as it may help explain a curious puzzle in my Bob Dylan research. If, as I concluded in my investigation into Dylan's wholesale expropriation of Shakespeare for the Basement Tapes, Dylan has effectively solved the "Hamlet problem" which has dogged scholars for centuries, why did he plant the solution with extreme obscurity in his song "Crash on the Levee"? (aka "Down in the Flood"). Couldn't he just have, um, written a letter to the editor of the Shakespeare Quarterly or something?
    In theory, he could have. Except that would be obtuse and boring. And Dylan is dealing with (and is probably fully aware that he is dealing with) a double-horror: first, the appalling news that Prince Hamlet is not a tragic hero but a vicious schmuck, a prince who is not just "melancholy mad" (with the emphasis on the melancholy, please) but actually crazy. It is a helluva jolt when one discovers this, and it is notable that almost all the scholars pussy-footing around the fact--and there have been quite a few--tend to avoid the conclusion or gloss over the evidence supporting it--wherein the second horror, that our critic-psychologists "who prophesize with the pen" have been routinely diagnosing Lord Lunatic as merely... stressed-out? For 400+ years. Has our western brain-trust really been so dense and derelict for all these centuries??
    With the exception of a handful of critics, yes. And even these few approach and circle the question most gingerly, never quite uttering the unthinkable. Perhaps the most notable of these hesitants is T. S. Eliot, who wrote a famous-in-academe essay on Hamlet (my most recent rediscovery of it came in a criticism textbook) wherein he lists the numerous ways in which the play Just. Doesn't. Add. Up.
    Included is the perennial question of "what's bugging the Prince of Denmark?" (if you have the time and a weird sense of humor, check every scholarly explanation of why Hamlet kills Polonius, sight unseen). At the end of the essay Eliot tosses up his hands, supposing it is just Shakespeare being his usual sui generis self, breaking all the rules for tragedy, God knows why. But still basically composing a tragedy. Go figure.
    To give a modicum of credit, Eliot clearly had good intuitive suspicions, even if they never found footing. My own literary lion, H. L. Mencken also had a few stray remarks about Hamlet, if not an entire essay; in one of them he flatly calls Prince Hamlet a "sophomore" which may be the lowest estimation of Hammie's character I've ever encountered. Clearly he had suspicions too. Maybe the two had even read Voltaire, who entertained some of the earliest and most extensive hunches about Hamlet not being quite on the level. (In his memoir My Life As Author and Editor, Mencken describes a casual meeting with Eliot where the two discussed the technicalities of their respective magazines; we can only speculate what they might have accomplished if they had butted heads about Hamlet instead).
    In any case it is easy to imagine Bob Dylan sitting dismayed at his ugly discovery and mulling how to handle it (he mentions the Hamlet-problem glancingly in his book Tarantula) until finally deciding to deflect the rotten Dane into another of his opaque cryptogram-songs.
    Yep, who needs the headache of sorting out the details of Shakespeare's closet-satire, and answering the yowls of the dull academics?-- leave THAT noise to posterity. Most astute.
    And in another century or so Will and Bob, those two sly speakers of the unspeakable, may get rehabilitated enough to get ledger-stones in Westminster Abbey too.

    PS: The title of this post comes from an very sharp English professor, who asked "Is he crazy?" as the very first comment on teaching the play to us. She asked the question as intently as if it really mattered, and it does.

Why high culture is always counterculture, but not vice versa

Tucked inconspicuously in the back of The Mencken Chrestomathy, in a section titled...

We need culture... WHY exactly?

Dedicated readers of this blog (I'm joking of course) may recall, a few posts ago, my sneering at the almighty dollar-standard that bestrides the arts, my snorting at the media coverage that treats culture as just another economic activity, needing continued growth, providing important jobs, yadda yadda, etc.

Obviously my sarcasm needs to be cranked up a notch or four because, lo and behold, here is more of the same in the Globe and Mail Sept. 4 under the headline "Canada must refuel for cultural creativity."

Yep, you could recycle this cliche endlessly, and you do... you do...

So far ahead of his time he's lurking in ours

It's a pretty rare day I don't think about H. L. Mencken at least ten times.

And here is Dan Gardner of the Ottawa Citizen, Sept 3, starting a column on presidential aspirant Mr. Romney by citing the "dour" satirist of yore. Dour??
   And yet, I've heard Mencken called "bilious" too, an even more tone-deaf assessment. Is this the same Mencken who publicly regretted not calling his second and third volumes of memoirs Happy Days II and Happy Days III to match the first title? (yes, LONG before the TV show, you ahistoric moron). Is this the 67-year-old summing up his life at an age when bitterness is almost automatic, who states:

(Chrestomathy quote: "I have little call to join the race of viewers-with-alarm" etc./approx.... damn but I hate research... and of course my copy of the Mencken Chrestomathy  has disappeared into the office uber-mess...)

(Yep, another teaser for an item for sale. Sorry! Stay tuned!)  =]

Part 2.1 Dylan-Shakespeare: Adding Fool to the Firesign

Yes, I do love Firesign Theatre; I'm not a Dylan monomaniac! But when I stumbled upon this cute item, a found-poem by one of the Firesign guys...

http://www.radiofreeoz.com/spam-poem-8212012/comment-page-1/#comment-36834

...the natural-born opportunist in me just HAD to turn it to advantage in my flaky-obsessive drive to prove DYLAN PLAGIARIZED SHAKESPEARE!!! Excuse the media sensationalism there, but really, what does a guy have to DO to be taken seriously?

Anyway, here is my self-serving reply to the found-poem:


Found poems can be great fun. Bet you were absolutely splitting your gut at how tender and sensitive this one turned out! Hee hee! I recall another such creature from the 90s from our University of Alberta student literary inconsequence called "Subliminal Racism in Websters"  which was simply four or five two-word lines consisting of the two-word index-headings from the Dictionary, Hilarious as heck when the right adjective coincided with the right identifiable group (and of course it had built-in alliteration). Okay, maybe not quite as funny as your "What Makes America Great?" schtick ("Ask the cop in the woodpile!")
   In fact I was so inspired by this sophomore exercise (not yours), that I composed a found poem myself, consisting of various commercial signs I drove by in my taxi, all tailored to resemble Zen profundity or something (title: "Wisdom Along the Way'). Great fun, but a bit laborious in the filtration and arrangement end.
   But hey, my intent here isn't to tell you how much I've loved you guys over the years (y'know, in a non-carnal sense). It's to plug my own crackpot theory that Bob Dylan derived much or most of those screwball _Basement Tapes_ songs from Shakespeare, of all sources. Seriously!--check the blog! Okay, maybe some water-pipe filtration was involved in Dylan's writing too. Not that my theory is so important, I'm just trying to achieve recognition as the biggest flake in western civilization since Alan J. Weberman!
   Keep up the shoes for industry, guys! Love ya! Non-carnally!

PS: I'm gonna play your _Shakespeare's Lost Comedie_ LP backwards too, and see if it adds any evidence! Yes I can!

      *    *    *


Whoa!--an actually COMPLETED blog-post! How often does THAT happen? No, wait, I can make this baby incomplete too, by promising to dredge up those two found-poems mentioned. Heck, it's been a while since I posted/re-published a golden oldie...

And in this pigsty of an office I could be digging for years...

Of Shakespeare, capitalism and shower-curtains

The donut-shop clerk asked if I wanted a free coffee.

Um, thanks--but what for?

Answer: delivering a box with a plausible amount on the meter. Other cabbies doing such trips, he said, used tricks to boost the price, e.g. loops through the parking lot.

I left, pondering my flip-the-flange-and-win cup. Ah to nab a big cash prize!

Maybe after nine years (15 now) there would be time to finish the damn Shakespeare book. An edition of his obscure play Troilus and Cressida, if you must know. Only the greatest detective-story never told.

The odds of a cup win? Never mind. Less delusively, I’d give my kingdom for a publishing contract. But no, Shakespeare is the fiefdom and closed-shop of professors. No sane publisher wants any part of a goofy-cabbie edition...
    *   *   *

Okay, this one is for sale by my mercenary self, and therefore will not be plastered here in its entirety until it has been published for money, or I have  failed thereat.

What the heck, here's another excerpt from the  long-winded thing:

...Or what of taxi-driving, an enterprise fraught with economic peculiarities like restrictive licensing, fixed pricing, and a hooker who gets in and says, “”Hi. I’m just in from Vancouver and I don't have a driver yet...”

Awkwardest. Silence. Ever.

How do I tell the hooker I am married with three kids, and quite as boring as a softwood-lumber editorial? And to think it was a journalism teacher of yore who suggested hack-driving as a dose of realism. But my farcical and unprofitable writing career since j-school now sits in dusty file-folders of a projected memoir. ... Mulling the failure, I catch the stray regret that probably crosses the mind of every media fossil at some point: “Man, I coulda been a VP Marketing with a six-digit income. Or a fridge-magnet magnate. Instead of being a two-bit contender, which is what I am. And what the hell happened to Alan Fotheringham anyway?...

That's it. But you DO want to know the significance of the exploding Zamboni in solving a curious scientific quasi-puzzle,  don't you? Yes you do! =]

GRoM&LA Ch.4: Once More to the Mess (Sorry, E.B.)

The lake would have been much preferable. Fresh air, and the damn city forgotten for a few hours. But nope, here I am, plowing through the textual heaps again.
   The Nov. 3, 2011 National Post atop one pile, with a big full-page spread on the Shakespeare authorship thing. Not really my area (which is Shakespeare's religious ideas as structure and agenda) but authors Cushman and Kay are in fine form, thumping conspiracy theorists. Having just dipped into the Sonnets, I can add that Shakespeare himself sneers at noble titles. But hey, this could be just a VERY clever smoke-screen by Lord deVere or Lord Bacon, eh?
   In the same A-section: some jihadis have bombed a French satirical magazine. Clip, clip--to be added to a still unsorted batch of things on the Danish cartoon crisis and satire in general (don't ask about my filing system, please!) Also: front-page item on Israel planning to nuke Iran. Not exactly news, and  the story is long-developing (remember Krauthammer in [2006?] saying Israel and USA had maybe a year or two to decide?) It goes to the recycling bag.
   And again: Saskatchewan natives want their own provincial political party. Oy gevalt! But I suffer from an aboriginal issues fixation, and it gets clipped.

      *      *      *

July 23
Reality intervenes. And, to tell the truth it felt good to have spent a day mostly outside mowing the lawn. Downing a few raspberries. Bagging garbage. Doing tangible things. Fate, with all its dubious inscrutables has somehow made me an intellectual, but heavy thinking is such a dismal, abstract, futile business (not to mention over-populated) that my usual response is to avoid it. Again, no publication is likely to pay me to scatter these many-splendored maunderings across newsprint or the internet. So forgive me if my thoughts turn to carpentry and slapping together some shelves.
   But wait, here is Yann Martel, newly-arrived on Twitter! Saying... nothing? (later: seems to be a fake, or cyber-squatter or something). And here is today's (July 23) Globe and Mail with extensive in-house coverage of the Aurora massacre! (not just AP wire-copy as our local Edmonton Journal has, but an entire centre-spread). Once more your media junkie is suctioned away from real work.
   No surprise that the Mop and Pail's p.1 headline is "A top student, a 'weird' loner." You've heard this cliche before right? Oddly enough, it arrives as I drag a battered copy of Goldman's The Lives of John Lennon from a closet and find that Lennon was "a solo personality and a loner all his life" (p.86). Cue the "madness is allied to genius" trope.
   What I notice most, however is the  Globe's bad English. For instance this lede to the Obama sidebar: "Despair all around him, U.S. President Barack Obama offered hugs, tears and the nation's sympathy to survivors of the Colorado shooting rampage and to families whose loved ones were shot dead."
   Leaving aside the imprecision of "survivors" (versus wounded), and the odd suggestion that Obama is wrapped in despair, where did the writer FIND this "despair"? Grief, anguish, shock maybe, but despair means complete spiritual collapse. Where was that? Various reported reactions show people being largely defiant and tough-minded. Is Canada's national newspaper taking lessons from the overblown rhetoric of Maclean's magazine? Hm.
   Again, Obama might cite or invoke the nations sympathy, but can he "offer" it? Okay, maybe, debatably he can. But is he then the "national consoller (sic) in chief"? The mind boggles. Yet again, the mayhem-suspect was reported, by the Globe's entry-level philosophers, to be studying "the physical mechanics of the brain." Any Grade 11 Biology student would wince at that description, no?
   Flip the page and the headline is "The eruption of a new code of the street." An erupting code?? Don't ask. I'm off to saw lumber. The damn newspapers can wait.

      *      *      *


-ongoing...

...or maybe offgoing...

A cabbie editing Shakespeare?? Huh???

My projected edition of the Bard's Troilus and Cressida will have a four-part intro:

1. Circumscription. Six pages of quotations, mostly from the scholarly poohbahs, about Shakespeare's elusive religion and politics, and about this "problem play."

2. Preface. The wacky story of how I more or less blundered my way into solving the problem (for full Preface, see below).

3. Prologue I. "Shakespeare's Repentance: What to Recognize When Rethinking a 'Conservative Authoritarian.'" All about Shakespeare's allusive coding in an earlier work (the cute part is that Shakespeare never wrote anything called Repentance, overtly anyway *hee hee*). Ideally this portion will be first presented as a public lecture at my alma mater, the University of Alberta, so profs and I can go at it with hammer and tongs!

4. Prologue II. "Troilus and Cressida as Mega-Parable." How Shakespeare continued his coding pattern into a cleverly concealed satire -- at a time when satire was illegal...

           Preface

(To come...)

Dr. Swift meets the doctors sluggish (The Loserly Legacy Ch. 2)

How bad can English scholarship get? Well, this old term-paper, earmarked for a collection of my various undergrad cud-chewings (working title: Purely Academic) plumbs the depths of the wretchedness! Possibly the scholarly journals are as bad as Maclean's?

### In progress -- i.e. still hunting through the office mess for the damn thing). Did I mention that the prof marking the paper said it was the first time she had ever seen a Playboy publication cited? A **FREE** dog-eared Norton Anthology to the first person to guess WHICH Playboy, um, autobiography (hint: famous guy using a stage-name; real surname Schneider). ###

Balloon Farm and Shakespeare

Just for the hell of it I did a maiden search for a tune on the Google-thing to the right (fine political position, eh?) (2012: Wait--is it left now?)

"Give it a hard one," I thought -- Balloon Farm's "A Question Of Temperature" (a truly great, nitty-gritty 60s rocker).

Nada.

The great, vast Internet is still a bit blinkered, it seems. Just as it remains blinkered on the possibility that Shakespeare's Hamlet is a satire. Tsk.

A late gun for culture

Does anyone read blogs? If a journal falls in the cyberforest, is the bear Catholic? Hm. The only blog I've ever read (once, partly) was by a guy from Firesign Theatre who was writing a weird detective story with a bird (yes, a bird) as the shamus. I don't cruise the web much at all, to tell the truth. Old-fashioned and print-centred--that's your correspondent.

In fact, like most Firesign, the blog was wonderful, but at the risk of sending thee rapidly to a better site (More Sugar I seem to recall) let me leave my endorsement at that. The rest is Jens-promotion. Anything to get my durned projects hatched!

What projects, you ask? (as I stuff the rhetorical question into your mouth).Well, how about the newsletter that's been in the back of my mind forever and a week: the Northern Culture Monitor. Although cultural studies seems to be a hot fad these days, and a great many scribblers practition it like recycled, wafer-thin sociology, I don't notice that we are much wiser or our culture much richer. Maybe what we need is less boosterism and more satire? Yeah, that's the ticket.

And what would Megacrotchety write about? Hm. The Ronnie Hawkins review I couldn't sell. The obscenity case that is almost the reverse of the Sharpe case and sheds a nice sidelight on current (wacky) legal definitions,(unlike Sharpe too, it got almost zero media attention). A Globe and Mail rant against science in arts matters. The alleged anti-semitism of H. L. Mencken. The lavish reissues of the Lovin' Spoonful's old records. Shakespeare for healing Iraq. A possible anthology of newspaper columnists. Cultural policemen and their weapons.

But it's late. The kids must be tucked in and all that. Bye till next Tuesday.

PS: Anyone want to see a picture of my 2001 "Stalkwell" Hallowe'en costume? Anyone hereabouts have their own culture story they figger the media mangled, missed or over/underplayed? Anyone out there at all? Testing, testing. Testing for intellectual life... July 19, 2005